Walk to the ends of the earth
WALK AS IF THE APOCALYPSE has been underway for some time. It has.
...I set off towards AN/FPS-95, System 441a, Cobra Mist. The
other visitors head off in the opposite direction, towards the
weapons labs. A flock lines up to face me, fifty sheep stand
abreast. I walk two miles down a concrete road. There is
something intensely ascetic, meditational even, about concrete
roads. For fifteen years this place, this nature reserve, was a
major player in maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent. Here they
tested the ballistics of the bombs and the reliability of the trigger
mechanisms. Without reliability there was no real deterrent, and
the enemy had to know how reliable it was, so maybe the Ness’s
intelligence vulnerability was useful, intentional even. Bombs,
‘duds’, were dropped, while tracked by operators using steerable
helical aerials mounted on the trials building. To the naked eye,
even with an aircraft at 40,000 feet, gleaming white in a blue sky,
the open bomb bay doors and the orange painted weapon were all
visible. Bombs were ‘cans of tomatoes’. The weapon, a Yellow
Sun, solar fire, was released well before it was overheard, to the
eye far too early, making a rumbling sound as its blunt nose
buffeted the air, then a huge splash a quarter of a mile offshore.
No nuclear materials were ever on the Ness; always substituted
with ‘a placebo’... this may not be entirely true. The training crews
of the V bombers knew there was little chance of surviving a real
raid; they were suicide bombers. Scimitars were also nucleararmed; top secret until all the details turned up in an issue of the
Eagle comic. No point in a deterrent unless the enemy knows
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precisely what it is; there is little room for misunderstanding in
nuclear chess.
First off the boat, I had marched this way in the hope of
walking solitarily across the two miles to the remnants of Cobra
Mist, remembering how being alone had affected my experience
of the wards, operating theatre, cinema and morgue of the
German underground hospital beneath Guernsey. And why, as a
teenager, I would sneak into the grounds of stately homes and
heritage sites after they were closed; not to vandalise or steal, but
to experience, to feel, because a curtain was pulled back in these
places after the visitors and staff were gone. The places behaved
differently on their own; but you had to sneak up on them.
I am less personally unnerved than I was under Guernsey; the
dispiriting is general this time. The distant, silent pylons, thin as
cotton thread, pin the grey reedy grasses to the grey skies. This is
a plane irradiated. I know that the shingle is alive with rare
species and that the greys and browns are just as much signs of
vibrancy as the greens and yellows on the Orford shore, the
brochure says so; but it is all a show, all set aside, things turned
out differently on the spit, hinged inadequately below Aldeburgh
the land flapped about in history for a while and then went limp.
In this displaced place time timed out, the Russians did not read
the Eagle, the back channels were not used in ’62, the enemy was
not empathised with, the Cuban Missile baby was never born. I
did not walk this walk. The animals act their parts, playing dead,
everything puts on a play of silence but the wind. I arrive at a
clumsily metaphorical bridge.
Beyond the cheap movie space station of the now silent, stilted
Foreign Office funded, BBC World Service transmitter, little
remains of Cobra Mist; a dim spread upon the ground like the
dusty spectre left by a bird crashing into a window pane. The very
thinness of the pylons, barely visible against the grey skies, and
the faint shadows of the ground plan all evoke the massive
invisible energy resources that once powered a fan of antennae
spread across more than one hundred and thirty acres, with a
giant broadcast signal of 10 megawatts, designed to detect
missile activity two thousand miles away.
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But Cobra Mist was not empathetic to its enemies, it was
haunted by the ghost of General Curtis LeMay, the architect of a
strategic bombing campaign responsible for the destruction of
40% of residential districts in sixty-six Japanese cities and
advocate of a bombing of Soviet missile sites in Cuba in 1962 that
would have begun a nuclear exchange; his spectre operated as an
organising force among the various active elements hung from
the eighteen strings of antennae radiating out from the centre on
the eastern shore and within the reflective mesh hung beneath
them. Wherever the antennae were ‘pointed’, they found missile
launches everywhere. Each time they turned on the system, the
LeMay possession started a war. The System was never used
operationally, and, closed after months of tests, at a final cost of
$150 million (almost one billion of today’s dollars). Having paid
my respects to its dubious corpse, I make my way back across the
island towards the remnants of the Atomic Weapons Research
Establishment. Three brown hares go skittering away across the
shingle; I had mistaken them for rusty ordnance.
The railings around the Bomb Ballistics building are tuned to C
major.
The Lighthouse will be allowed to crumble into the sea.
The pagodas strike me as elegant, their shapes designed to
absorb blast. I cannot get admittance to them because they are
“too dangerous”, though a party who have paid extra is visiting
them. Rent; even here. There is a very powerful atmosphere at the
entrance to AWRE Laboratory One, an ambience of torn souls and
troubled thoughts...
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